What a scorcher?

On Wednesday we were told by various media outlets that the 36 degrees recorded in some parts of the UK was a new record.

That’s strange. The Met Office’s own website shows a high of 38.5 degrees in 2003. It’s still nothing like the summer of 1976 when the temperature from 23 June to 7th July was always over 32 degrees somewhere in the UK – now that was a hot summer.

This week is not the first time rails have buckled from heat, nor the first time we have hit 36 degrees. I seem to remember it used to be thought very hot if we hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than 36 Celsius.

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64 Comments

Quite right Mr. Redwood. The BBC website had a front page story yesterday in which the headline was “Hottest since 2006”. When you clicked on the link, the first line of the story then added the word “July”…which isn’t quite the same.

@Horatio McSherry; Headlines being what they are they never give the full unabridged story, I’m sure that many other media outlets use the same ‘click-bait’ to entice readers, even more so the more commercial they are.

It happens in Britain, to mockery from exasperated commuters. But it also happens in other countries with seemingly less troubled train services. A new high speed service from Paris in 2001 was slowed by the risk of buckled rails. In the US that year, there were 44 accidents as a consequence of buckled rails. Compression stresses are thought to have caused a train crash earlier this year near Sydney, Australia, in which nine died.

The rails are heat stressed on laying for a normal range of temperature. We could stress the rails to a greater degree but as soon as winter came we’d have cracks all over the rails as it pulled itself apart.

Our mainly moderate climate makes it uneconomic to plan too much for extremes.

Indeed. Nearly all children, even the brighter ones, now come out of schools having swallowed the AGW catastrophe (huge exaggeration of) religion whole. This despite the fact that non have actually lived through any warming at all (unless they are over 18). Temperature over the last hundred years have been remarkably stable.

Indoctrination by the BBC, school teachers, government, the EU, many of our Universities and through rather juvenile examinations.

The media do not read facts and figures, they want headlines whether true or false.
The BBC do not recognise recorded temperatures prior to 1880. It would be inconvenient for their global warming/climate change theory. They are happy to ignore historical facts.
The Met Office are a little more circumspect as they hold all the records, in particular the CET.

The Greek government wants more of its debts to be forgiven. About €100 billion it owed to private investors was cancelled in 2012, but now it wants the “official” creditors to forgive a large part of the debts owed to them. Or if the debts cannot be forgiven outright at least repayment could be deferred to some point in the distant future. And the IMF now agrees that this needs to happen if Greece is to have any chance of recovery:

My prediction is that the Greek people and their government will capitulate in the face of the overwhelming might of Germany, with its eurozone allies taking great care that they are clearly seen to be on the winning side, while a short-sighted and self-interested British government quietly cheers from the sidelines as the last traces of troublesome Greek resistance are crushed.

I am not surprised we are fed such disinformation. The Green Blob is in full-on propaganda mode in the lead up to the forthcoming Paris COP(?) meeting in the Autumn when we will be told, again, that the world is going to fry because of man made CO2 emissions. On closer inspection these claims ususally turn out to be based on extreme assumptions, including the effect of forcing on global temperatures.which has no sound scientific basis. The reality is that global temperatures have remained more or less flat for the past 18 years or so. What we are experiencing is extreme alarmism, not extreme temperatures.

Indeed the real disaster is the damage the green religion is doing with their bonkers subsidised “renewable” and bio-fuel agenda. This when the money could be used to do things that actually would do some good rather than harm.

Well it has been a consistent 36C where I am but at least I can get in the pool to cool down.

On a lighter side I have at last found a good use for all those windmills that Spain has covered the hilltops with. There I was at about 1500 meters agl near Avila at the entrance to a wide east west valley with a line of windmills on the hills to the north and south. Those to the south faced south, those to the north faced north. Sign of two converging air masses meeting in the centre of the valley and then flowing vertically. I shot of eastwards at 110 Km/Hr climbing at 5.0 meters a second. Whoopee for windmills, they have their uses at last.

I hadn’t noticed? Well, its a one off and its gone PDQ. However, over the last few years I have collected a fair few electronic thermometers of the wifi variety. What I did notice yesterday pm was that the temperature had dropped some 10 deg C. Thats despite loads of clouds hanging about during the day.

So the planet can/does dump excess very quickly…feedback works big time in my view.

Recently the USA and Canada have had the coldest winters on record which fits in nicely with the cooldown period which we are due.
China is preparing for a reduction in global mean temperatures and no doubt this is why the lonnies have changed global warming to climate change.
No matter what happens with the weather we will be taxed to prevent climate change as it’s the next best thing to taxing the air that we breathe.
One point, we are not building any more water storage and we are shutting down our electricity supply. We still keep importing a million foreigners annually. How do we hope to cope.???

I sent Amber Rudd a piece “22 inconvenient truths” from a website called Watts up with that. I received a reply telling me that since this appeared on a blog it was not seen by experts. This is from a blog written by one of the most respected climatologists/ physicists in the World !!!
God help us when we have such ignorant people in charge of something so important. My energy bills are becoming un-affordable thanks to her.

There has also been little mention of the colder than average start to summer from the BBC (and others) where we had one of the coldest May and Junes recorded for many years.

Heatwave warnings a plenty from all media, as if one or two hot days are unwelcome and dangerous.
Here in the Midlands the long awaited hottest day of the year was cloudy until 2.00 pm and after a few suuny hours we had rainfall.

Despite all the media frenzy on the reporting of temperatures there still has been less than one degree of rise in global temperatures since 1900.
And a puzzling pause from 2000 onwards.

Why is it that right-wing, laissez-faire, neo-liberals, spawned in the Dickensian era; are also rampant climate change deniers? Please could someone explain, I can’t see the connection other than a universal hate of their fellow mankind 😉 😉 😉

Because the real reason behind the global warming religion is an attempt to transfer money from industrialised nations to poorer nations and an attempt to develop a world Government via the UN
If you look at actual data compared to dire predictions made by alarmists you see them not coming true already
Revisit Al Gore’s film and see his predictions and see just how many have not happened.
Less than one degree rise since 1900 and no rises since 2000 yet CO2 still rising.
2000 being the time when warmists predicted rapidly increasing rises in global temperatures.
For me its not denial nor skepicism.
Its just that the data is not currently following the hypothesis.

I think you’re being a little bit harsh in that ‘hate’ assessment. It’s not that.

It’s more that certain scientific advances, and increases in understanding, cause those who have a certain very right wing world view more problems than the rest of us. I was going to say ‘normal people’ but then I thought I’d better not 🙂

It’s not dissimilar from finding out how the economy really works. They have big problems with that too.

Well because its normally supported by people such as yourself who really believe that free marketers are Dickensian haters ( you really are deluded aren’t you) and anything that comes from that kind of thinking is normally questioned quite closely before being signed up to. Also I’m not sure why you think that right wingers are in any way collated with free markets. In my experience most right wingers are no more for free markets than left wingers or statist control freaks such as your good self.

sjb

May have a point as far as some right wingers are concerned.

Me I’m NOT a right winger, I am a free marketer , I know beyond doubt that any rise in long term Earth temperature is 1) Normal, 2) cyclical, 3) unlikely to be caused entirely by co2 emissions from man made artefacts. I distrust anything where politicians try to force something on us by first creating a scare story then when that fails making up the data. Of course I’m also old enough to remember all the other scare stories about CJD, AIDS, Herpes, Bird Flu, Ozone holes, Ice Ages that was the perceived scientific wisdom in the 70’s, peak oil, acid rain, year 2k etc etc etc. Predicting Armageddon is as old as, well as old as the bible . Its been one of the most overused control tactics for millennia. Free marketers believe in freedom.

Maybe Free marketers just have a more cynical grasp on reality rather than naively accepting academic theories. Maybe the reason free marketers are so successful is they see things differently to the mass of the brainwashed.

Peter Martin

Considering free marketers have a better understanding of how economies actually work by virtue of the fact most are quite successful in it , that is rather a silly statement too.

You guys can keep on hating, can keep on sneering and keep on peddling your theories, meanwhile I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank, I’ll be creating the jobs, paying the taxes and improving my little corner of the world.

Libby, are you sure about being a “free marketer”. I think you mean a “free marketeer”. Assuming you do actually “sell” things all over the world, as you said previously.

A “marketer” is a person whose duties include the identification of the goods and services desired by a set of consumers, as well as the marketing of those goods and services on behalf of a company. I have no idea what a “free marketer” is?

It may be pretty warm here but things are getting very much hotter in Athens – and in Berlin :

The IMF has published its report on Greece and confirmed that the country has no chance whatsoever of economic recovery without debt write offs totalling €80bn and additional loans of €50bn including €36bn from the Eurozone. At least 30% of the latter will have to come from Germany.

Merkel is now backed into a corner of her own making : Her own politicians and especially her voters will never accept the loss of this amount of money yet the alternative of Grexit will cost Germany much more – estimates put the figure at up to €82bn – and push the Eurozone further into crisis.

Ditto France, Netherlands, Finland and Austria.

By rights the IMF report should blow the campaign in Greece to vote Yes on Sunday right out of the water.

Mr Tsipras has immediately called for the debt write offs to be an essential part of any deal and for once he’s right : if there is no chance of recovery without another €50bn and 30% debt relief, as the IMF has suggested, then what is the point of accepting any deal that doesn’t include both ?

We can only hope that Greece votes No on Sunday.

If the people of Greece are brave enough to vote No, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande and Co will then have no way of kicking any kind of can down Athinas Street again.

In Sweden and Denmark May and June have been variously described as the coldest on record / the coldest for 50 years / the coldest for over a century. I don’t suppose we can read much into it but it would be nice if the BBC would inform us that this is inconsistent with the models.

OMG I am so fed up with hearing about this record and that record when really it’s a load of old bull. As many of your contributors to this blog have noticed, we have not all experienced a heat wave. Here in SW Scotland we have not got above 23 degrees even on the day that the BBC said we would see 27 degrees. We had some sun in the morning and it got quite warm and then it clouded over and it was blooming cold. if it hadn’t been for a couple of warmer days at the end on June we would have had the coldest start to summer on record averaging only 9 degrees during the day time. We were still in jackets and hats and I have only sat in the garden a couple of times. We have had a cold northerly wind much of the time. Yes, I would imagine Heathrow would be hot!! Very sheltered inland places and cities will be hotter. Let’s get a grip. It is only the up and coming global warming crap (excuse for a good booze up and a nice holiday for some, all expenses paid) event in Paris that is making the BBC and some of the media go into a frenzy but it will keep the renewable energy companies going for a few years more raking in the vast sums of money they get and taking it abroad which is because most of them are foreign. Scottish Power is in fact Iberdrola and Spanish. Very nice as they and other developers buy their turbines. Most of the work force are foreign too. All this ‘climate change’ will continue whatever the weather throws at us and anything considers slightly out of the ordinary will be viewed as life threatening and global terminal. We are all doomed!!

I’ve just been informed that the reference to the very warm weather does have some political significance after all! 🙂

Apparently it’s all to do with a leftish conspiracy to falsely convince the world that the emission of GH gases, mainly CO2, has the potential to cause dangerous warming of the Earth’s climate.

This was started at the turn of the 20th century by a Swedish Physicist known as Arrenhius who received a Nobel prize in 1903. He made various calculations of the extent to which a doubling of CO2 concentrations would increase global temperatures, which do not differ much from present estimates.

If he was a ‘closet red’, he did a particularly good job of keeping his views hidden. I can’t find any evidence in the literature for this.

The issue is not the scientific question of whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas which causes warming (other things being equal). That is clear. The issue is how much warming and what to do about it. The reason the left are so keen on global warming theory is the greater the scare, the more govts at the moment are reaching for statist, anti- capitalist solutions. Sceptics are quite right to point out that these solutions – huge subsidies for wind farms for example – have no hope of providing an alternative for fossil fuels. Bill Gates just made this point. Sceptics are also right to point out that the more alarmist predictions, both as to the amount of warming, and the incidence of extreme weather events, are not borne out by the evidence. In any other field of science that would lead to theoretical assumptions being changed.

Hmm I have no idea on the politics of Arrenhuis and frankly I don’t really care as I don’t think AGW is a particularly leftist stance. However what is interesting is that if you actually read his work Arrenhuis was trying to understand ice ages and he wrote a paper on why increasing co2 was a massive BENEFIT to the earth making large parts of it more habitable than it would otherwise be, stabilising the tendency for rapid cooling and improving plant/crop yield.

Yes it was quite possible for Arrhenius to claim a benefit. At the time Co2 levels had increased slightly to about 300ppmv from the pre-industrial level of 280ppmv.

As the Earth may have had a natural tendency to drop back into an ice age that slight increase could indeed be viewed as beneficial. We’ve since gone way beyond that to 400ppmv, and rising to something close to 560 ppmv ( a doubling of pre-industrial levels) on current projections by the end of this century.

I wonder what this academic would say about the current lack of global temperature rise since 1998 whilst CO2 volumes (measured in parts per million) have continued to gently rise?
How does that fit in with the theories?

The hottest July day on record is, by definition, a record breaker. What’s the problem with reporting that it’s a record breaker?

There have been hotter days in Britain, but they were in August. Pretending that reporting the hottest July day was somehow forgetting the hottest ever day is disingenuous. Reporting the facts isn’t propaganda, misrepresenting them like this is.

My problem with it is that it is mainly designed to advertsise the forthcoming climate summit in Paris and that it is further propaganda rather than proper reporting of weather.
There is a fashion for labelling warm days in Summer as actually dangerous rather than rejoicing these pleasant days.
The aim is to condition us plebs that warm is dangerous when the opposite is the case.
When there are colder than average summer temperatures as this year has been prior to these recent days very little is said.

About John Redwood

John Redwood won a free place at Kent College, Canterbury, He graduated from Magdalen College Oxford, has a DPhil and is a fellow of All Souls College. A businessman by background, he has been a director of NM Rothschild merchant bank and chairman of a quoted industrial PLC.